Top tech experts from Google, Red Hat, Oracle sent to save ObamaCare website
“As part of the ‘Tech Surge,’ we’ve added key personnel from the government and private sector, including expert engineers and technology managers,” Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said.
Among those rushing to the rescue is Michael Dickerson, a site reliability engineer from Google, and Greg Gershman, the innovation director for smartphone application maker Mobomo.
What they’re doing reminds me of a book in Software Engineering that was required reading when I was in college...
THE BOOK: The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
That was a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks, whose central theme is that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”. This idea is known as Brooks’ law, and is presented along with the second-system effect and advocacy of prototyping.
Brooks’ observations are based on his experiences at IBM while managing the development of OS/360. He had added more programmers to a project falling behind schedule, a decision that he would later conclude had, counter-intuitively, delayed the project even further. He also made the mistake of asserting that one project — writing an ALGOL compiler — would require six months, regardless of the number of workers involved (it required longer).
The tendency for managers to repeat such errors in project development led Brooks to quip that his book is called “The Bible of Software Engineering”, because “everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it.” The book is widely regarded as a classic on the human elements of software engineering.
What’s happening now looks like a repeat of Brook’s experience BEFORE he wrote the book. History repeats itself.